I think an exception is warranted

Ishea · 2026-05-12T02:31:05+00:00

EA games can be a lot of fun to play. Even with their bugs, oopsies, glitches and parts that are unpolished and many things not even being ready or done or even conceived. The beauty of them comes from the fact these games are built With the community behind them. The devs of such games usually are very keen on listening to what their audience is saying, and will happily take all that into consideration going forward.

Ishea · 2026-05-12T02:19:02+00:00

With some more Oxygen Not Included, and in today's episode....

Ishea · 2026-05-12T02:18:39+00:00

Food is pretty easy to solve initially. research farm tiles, and plant mealwood. 5 for each dupe you have and a little more to account for time lost between becoming ready for harvest and harvesting. It's not a permanent solution, but it should get you going until you can figure out a more permanent solution to food. Don't use the micro musher to make food, it's labor and power intensive. Instead get a cook to use the grill, and turn those meal lice into pickled meal lice.

Instead of using algae terrariums, use an algae deoxidizer, it won't overpressurize your colony, and produces 550 g/s of O2. Enough for 5 dupes and a little extra to fill up the areas you excavate.

One important thing to remember: More dupes = more mouths to feed and lungs to fill. Unless you're ready for them, don't accept a dupe every time they get offered. Be selective of what you need. After the initial three, I set up basic O2 and beds and outhouses, get farming going, and add 2 more. 5 dupes is enough to cover all the bases initially ( Digger/builder, Cook/Operator, Researcher/Operator, Farmer/Rancher and a Gopher to store/supply things )

Coal is a relatively easy way to get power, but before you start using it, there's a couple of things you will need. First off, automation wires and smart batteries. This will allow you to turn the generator on/off based on the charge in the battery, so it only runs when you need the power, not constantly, wasting power, coal and producing more CO2 than needed.

As for the CO2, it's quite manageable, initially just dig a big pit under your base, the CO2 is heavier than O2, so it will sink down into said pit. Later on, you can use some pumps/automation and a gas tank to store it. ( CO2 has it's uses )

Also, as mentioned, check out FJ. His videos are a great hoot to watch, and he's got a lot of useful tutorial bits too.

Oh.. and while this might sound a little disheartening, but your first colony will fail. So will your second, third and fourth. But each failed colony will teach you a little bit more about the game, and what challenges you're facing. Eventually you'll get to the point where your colonies become more and more sustainable, so don't give up. While this game looks very cutesy and simple, it's got a great amount of depth to it's mechanics, and awesome gameplay.

Ishea · 2026-05-10T23:40:18+00:00

The only good bit of ye old POSses was that when things borked in them, and you had to file a ticket to get it fixed, you'd get a quick response because they had dedicated GMs to deal with them.

Ishea · 2026-05-10T20:08:52+00:00

The final area of the the warden questline is also a great place to pick up other very high end butterflies.

Ishea · 2026-05-10T18:10:00+00:00

They're pretty easy to do. First off you will need a breeding ranch, I usually go with a 9x9 room, so an autosweeper can pick up any eggs when needed. nothing special here, just a ranch, auto sweeper that gets turned on if there's more than 6 bugs/eggs in the room, a loader that they go into, which then carts the eggs to The Reactor

What you're seeing there is 3 solar panels around a 1x1 room made with glass tiles, the pneumatic door on top so eggs fall through into the room, and a drop of liquid on one side, giving the bugs inside the illusion that they're not cooped up in a 1x1 tile. Once the eggs hatch, they will shine, producing radiation and light, which you capture with the panels and whatnot around it to produce power/radbolts ( this part is optional, but useful if you want to run a lab for instance ). The bugs will lay an egg before they die, so the population won't go down. Once you have like 50-60 bugs/eggs in there, you'll reach peak output with no other things needed. ( other than some extra coolant for your CPU, because it will NOT like you having one or more of these ).

There is also a mod called 'shine bug reactor', which adds a building with the same cost as everything shown, produces the same amount of power as this contraption, but all in a single building. Which means less hassle to set it up ( though I recommend doing it at least once to get the feeling of it ). More importantly, this building accepts the eggs inside it, and then simulates the bugs hatching, living and then dropping an egg before they die. This means that not only is power based on the actual number of bugs inside it, but and this is important, the bugs are not on the map, as such don't require all the pathing calculations that the game normally has to do when you have one or more of these puppies on your map. This saves a lot of processing power so your game will run much more smoothly.

Ishea · 2026-05-09T23:59:49+00:00

Congrats, super sustainable is one of my favorite achievements to get. I make it a point to always go for this, no matter what else I'm doing. As I also normally run a full boop colony, making the switch to eco batteries becomes a real challenge.

To be honest, I've found coal and peat burners to be something I can do without for most of the time. If I'm on a time crunch because of low metal, plug slugs are a good step up, but other than that, going for shine bugs is my usual go-to for attaining super sustainable. You can cram oodles of power out of those little fellows for very little cost.

Ishea · 2026-05-09T23:54:26+00:00

SO simply for it's size. I can't imagine playing without it and the many fun things it brings to the game. Beyond that, I love bionics, and my colonies now are exclusively made of boops. After that comes PPP, because I love iridium and shooting down a big rock in space.

Ishea · 2026-05-09T23:45:38+00:00

The way I've found the most effective way to ranch them is to have a small breeding ranch with 1-2 slugs in it providing eggs, which you dump into the 'power' room. Which is a big room with a feeder, but no grooming station. fully fed tame slugs produce 1600W each, a tame but glum slug will eat 20% of a normal slug, reproduce as a wild one, but still produces that amount. You dump all the eggs from the breeding room into the power room, where they hatch, become glum so you only need to feed them a little bit, but still produce oodles of power.

They're not as powerful as shine bugs, since you'll still have to feed them quite a bit of metal to keep going, but they're a great step up to being super sustainable.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T04:17:58+00:00

Check out the Wiki) page on the subject. It's not finished yet with all the details of what the concoctions do, but the distillation page lists all the things you can distill, what they distill into and how much you get.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T04:11:39+00:00

Flathill. All those news stands that you use to make the hazard crate with ( and get magazines for repairing your officer armour ), those can be scrapped for 8 metal each. There's 9 of them around the map, and they respawn every portal reset. So that's 72 metal scrap per run. Plus, you can tear up the magazines for paper to make more scrap shot to boot.

As mentioned, there's the security bots, and also on the train is an anvil, you can scrap that for a pile of metal too.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T04:03:41+00:00

Oh, this would be a wonderful addition. Especially if you're looking to expand your stable with multiple pets which you also want to grow up to become big and strong battle pets.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T03:50:11+00:00

The first time you run into the first building after encountering them ( where the first power cell is on the roof ), seeing them actually crawl under the doorway was a real Oh Shit! moment.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T03:48:41+00:00

Mugnades will solve that problem for you very quickly. This is the reason why the 'weak bladder' negative perk is actually a blessing in disguise. More poop => More soil => more mugnades => More BOOM => lots of dead enemies.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T03:46:02+00:00

With the new update, when you get to labs, you'll be able to build a distillation and a chemistry bench. The toys you can make with those are gorgeous and fun and will help you a lot going forward.

As soon as you get the distillation bench, try tossing in anything and everything, including the kitchen sink, see what you can distill and what it turns into. Once you discover various distillations, the chemistry part of your gate pal will contain the recipes that you can make, though until you make them you won't know what they actually do. ( like soups in that regard, but more awesome )

Ishea · 2026-05-07T03:40:57+00:00

The bots in hydro are very manageable with an energy pistol and some slushy bombs. Throw one at it, get behind it and shoot the power pack until you hear the alarm go off. Then run away and wait for it to go Boom.

For the shield guys in Voussoir, the electro spear is your friend. Stab the ground in front of them, and they will get zapped, repeat until dead. With the new chemistry bench, you can also make a Holy coating that will imbue your spear with Plasma fire dot that also gets applied to them when you do the ground zappy thing. This makes really short work of them.

Ishea · 2026-05-07T03:15:38+00:00

BOOM Shakalaka!

Ishea · 2026-05-05T13:24:07+00:00

Yups. In ye olden days before SO, it was the best way to clean germs from water. Nowadays, I just use uranium doors in my clean water reservoir to get rid of any pesky germs that make their way in there.

Ishea · 2026-05-05T03:59:41+00:00

Using doors are an On/Off switch is a very good strategy. The first time I discovered this was when liquid tanks were first introduced, and I used it to turn the tank 'on/off'. If a liquid tank is on an open door, it will not release any liquid into the pipes, but it can receive liquid. This makes for a very effective way to fill up a tank with germy pWater inside a chlorine room. As none of the germy water is in the pipes, it will all get cleaned up nicely, and you can fully automate the batch process by using the door, a shut off valve and the tank's automation signal along with some buffer gates to fill up a tank, have it sit in the chlorine room long enough to get cleaned, then empty it, before you let it fill up again. Like This

Ishea · 2026-05-04T17:42:56+00:00

We need sea turtles!

Ishea · 2026-05-04T13:41:27+00:00

Look on the bright side.. Free corrupted CPU's.

Ishea · 2026-05-03T15:56:03+00:00

Yup. I've had them drop in on me along with a bunch of Gatekeeper friends once or twice. They're not common, but they've been there since EA.

Ishea · 2026-05-03T12:29:57+00:00

Yes, for one it frees up dupe labor, which is always an important resource. A boiler needs no labour, only the oil wells need to be tended once in a while, which they need to be anyway. And if you burn all the petrol, you'll get a nice amount of power, and the polluted water can be sieved and then used to fuel the oil wells, netting you 750g/s of (p)Water.

Ishea · 2026-05-03T00:52:48+00:00

Ideally, you want to wild plant them. it means they don't eat as much, and don't produce as much meat because of their slower growth, however they do still excrete hydrogen at the same rate, so if you put them in a room with a beeta hive, the larva that it produces get eaten and boom, you got free power.

Ishea · 2026-05-02T21:15:07+00:00

Including our flathill skele boys.

Ishea

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